The Gray Chronicles
by ashesandhoney
Summary: A series of shorts exploring Tessa Gray's life between the years of 1937 and 2008. Some are sad, some are pure fluff, some are adventures, each has a date and a little summary at the top of the chapter.


Poets, Drunks and Immortals

Set in 1994, Tessa visits friends at Cambridge and they break into one of the lounges to drink and tell stories.

* * *

><p>Tessa sat with her feet up on an ottoman and a book open in front of her. She wasn't reading. She was listening. Two warlocks were spread out on the sofas in the graduate student's lounge in Clare College where one of them was living while he finished his degree from Cambridge in Medieval French Poetry. The doors were locked and sealed with magic so no one else could join them. This and the fact that the others weren't students would probably have been frowned on if they got caught. That they were passing around a bottle of stolen port probably wouldn't help matters much.<p>

"Shut up, Frankie," the tiny warlock beside Tessa said throwing a couch cushion at the man who was climbing up onto the window sill to recite Medieval French Poetry in the name of the new boy he was seeing. Frankie was a nickname, he was actually named Charles Wilfred Hamilton but he had blue eyes, round as dollars and solid sky blue from lid to lid. The nickname had started as Old Blue Eyes then Sinatra but it had become just Frankie over the years. He tried to convince people to use Sinatra from time to time because it sounded cooler. Tessa hadn't known he was Charles until he'd asked her to edit an essay for him just a few weeks ago. He wore sunglasses to class so he wouldn't have to bother with glamours.

"But I am madly in love with him," Frankie insisted from his precarious perch on the window ledge.

"You barely even know the bastard," Lijing told him. She was five feet tall, thin enough to look malnourished with a trail of red scales running down from behind her ears to her tail which was longer than she was tall and flicked back and forth like a cat's when she was irritated. Right now it was curled like a lemur's on the sofa beside her. She was Frankie's best friend though they had very little in common. Frankie had the kind of British upbringing that leads one to studying poetry at prestigious universities while Lijing had grown up on the poverty line in a neighbourhood in Beijing where visitors did not ever go. Frankie fell in love twice a week and Lijing was so cynical it almost seemed put on.

Tessa wasn't a student. She had met Lijing and Frankie during a very strange vacation in Beijing that had ended with her buying up 9 Downworld brothels and functionally destroying the cartel that ran them. That had been five years ago and Frankie had invited her up to Cambridge for the weekend when she'd called to check in on them.

"What's your favourite part of being love?" Tessa asked Frankie who hopped down off the window and came over to consider her and try and figure out if she was being sarcastic. She was serious. She didn't think he was really in love any more than Lijing did but she was genuinely curious. She closed her book, medieval French poetry because she was trying to be supportive, and gave Frankie her best earnest and interested face.

"He's home, it's good to know that I have someplace that I belong. We will build a life together," he said and then he started to recite something in archaic French which ended up with Lijing using her tail to scoop up Tessa's book and fling it at him. Tessa was smiling at that answer but not the poetry. He was a terrible orator and even though she was fluent in French she didn't understand either the pronunciation or the dialect.

"Pretty words mean shit all," Lijing said.

"She's right," Tessa said. "Don't get me wrong, I love pretty words. I am very susceptible to pretty words but they don't mean anything if they're not backed up by anything anything else. Tell us a story, something that actually happened that proves that you've found a person to come home to. What do all those writing workshops say?"

"Show don't tell," Lijing said right on cue.

Frankie paced around for a minute before flopping down on the sofa and taking the bottle back from Lijing and taking a swig. He was thinking hard. The boy in question was in his Lyric Poetry class and they had gone on three dates. He didn't know him very well.

"Nothing?" Lijing teased.

"We haven't been together long," Frankie said.

"Doesn't matter," Tessa said. "You know when it's real and it's all in the little things. It's the way he squeezes your hand when you're nervous or remembers your favourite book or says just what you didn't know you needed to hear."

"You're a romantic?" Lijing asked incredulous, "I will have to restructure our entire friendship. I thought you were cynical. You're my cynical soul mate. Not as mean as I am but you don't fall in love like he does."

"I don't fall in love easy," Tessa corrected. "That's not the same as cynical."

"So tell us a story then," Frankie said. Then in a poor imitation of her accent he repeated what she'd said, "Some moment, some real thing that actually happened that proves that you found a person to come home to."

Tessa smiled, a little sadly maybe but these people didn't know her well enough to see it. She reached out for the bottle and took a drink of the wine while she thought. She ran through memories so old they felt like they'd been stretched thin and brittle. The others waited. Tessa didn't tell stories about herself. They couldn't even say for sure how old she was beyond the rather vague "more than a hundred."

"When I got married it was customary to leave for your honeymoon from the reception," she said.

"You're married?" Lijing yelled at her in a tone of voice that implied that this was akin to killing babies and building cities on the moon. Impossible and horrific.

"Yes, I was married," she said then pointed an accusing finger at Lijing who was gaping at her, "If you want me to tell stories, you have to shut your pie hole."

"Good bye, pie hole," Lijing said clamping her hands over her mouth.

"Back then people were supposed to leave for the honeymoon as soon as the final toasts had been made. That was normal and expected but we couldn't. I can't remember why now but we couldn't leave right away. He had just taken over a rather serious job and it was probably something to do with that," she rolled the wine bottle between her hands as she spoke and she didn't really look at any of them.

"So we ended up spending our first month together in the suite that we were supposed to move into after the honeymoon. It hadn't been redecorated, none of our personal things had been moved in. There were all kinds of little issues with everything. Like not having anything to put on after the wedding night," she laughed a little.

"But the worst part was the wallpaper in the bedroom. I can't remember why we couldn't leave or whether the maid had to bring up my clothes each day or anything like that but I remember that wallpaper," she was staring off into space. She didn't seem to see Frankie clamping a hand over Lijing's mouth when she started to ask something, probably about having maids.

"We were lying there in bed, it had to be in the first week or so, before we started to get really comfortable with each other. It took some adjusting to get used to waking up with someone else. He turns to me and says, 'The wallpaper needs to die,' which I wholeheartedly agreed with. We got it into our stupid heads to pull it down ourselves. At six o'clock in the morning. In our pajamas.

"We were not handy people. He was a proper gentleman who had always had servants to do that sort of thing and I had been raised by a family too poor to afford home renovations beyond pasting paper over the broken windows in our apartment so we didn't freeze to death in the winter," Tessa said smiling at the memories.

"I remember him shirtless and picking at wallpaper edges with a knife. I'm hanging onto the edge of a bookshelf trying to pull it off in strips and we have this moment where we realize how incapable we both are and we start to laugh. Just killing ourselves. I had to sit down in the middle of the floor until I could breathe again.

"By then though, we've made a horrific mess of the walls. I can tell you that terrible wallpaper is better than shredded terrible wallpaper. I remember the work man who was eventually hired to fix it telling us that that 'wasn't how you remove wallpaper' and W- my husband turned to him and in this flat, level voice says, 'we have in fact, noticed that,' and the two of us had to leave the room before we started laughing in the poor man's face.

"I still have a piece of it somewhere," Tessa said. "Because that was the first time we really knew what it meant to be in it together. Not just the grand romantic gestures and rescues and dramas and all the pretty words. I loved him long before that day but that was the first time I knew without a shadow of a doubt what it meant to be married to him. We would succeed and we would fail together in both the big things and the little ones."

There was a moment when she finished her story and helped herself to another swig from the almost empty bottle while the others just watched her. She felt immeasurably old in that moment. It wasn't just the weight of years, it was the weight of a life that these two couldn't even imagine. It felt as though she'd snuck into a children's party where she didn't belong.

"So when do we meet him?" Lijing asked and Frankie, who was usually the more oblivious one shot her a wide eyed glare that she ignored as she twisted in her seat to look at Tessa directly. Neither of them would have imagined a story like that coming from Tessa. She had always seemed calmer, cooler, more collected than the rest of them. She did not fall in love. Lijing tried to remember if she'd ever even seen her flirt with a boy at a party.

"He's been gone longer than you've been alive, Li," Tessa said softly and the sadness was visible in her smile this time.

"Married a mortal," Frankie said. "Why would you set yourself up for that heartbreak?" He'd slouched down low against the couch cushions while she'd talked.

Tessa turned to him, "I hope someday that you will truly understand this. I spent a lifetime with him. And I've spent a lifetime since without him. Losing him broke my heart but I wouldn't give it up. I chose to marry him even knowing that I might out live him."

She stopped and collected her thoughts. Lijing raised an eyebrow and pursed her lips to cover her own emotions. Frankie, who thought he understood love was frowning. Tessa was suddenly deeply sad for him because he hadn't found it yet and he wanted it so much.

"I will carry that loss with me for my entire life. If I live to be a thousand, I will still miss him. But, and this is the part I hope you will someday understand, it was worth it," she said the last part to Frankie directly. She smiled with just a shine of tears in the corner of her eyes. Then she finished the wine, squeezed Frankie's hand once and left the room. The two warlocks stared after her.


End file.
